What are digital activities in friendship apps?

Science · by Simone Rainieri · 9 read

Digital activities in friendship apps are shared things two people do together inside the app, rather than just messaging back and forth. The common ones are synced co-watching of a video or film, synced music listening, prompt games, and voice or video calls. Their point is not novelty. It is that doing something alongside another person builds a bond faster than talking about yourselves does, and there is solid psychology behind why. This explainer covers what these activities are and the research on why shared experience works.

If you have only ever used a friendship app as a text inbox, this is the feature category that changes what the app is for. A chat thread asks two strangers to perform being interesting. A shared activity gives them something to point at together, which is a far more natural way for humans to warm to each other.

What counts as a digital activity

The label covers anything you do together in real time inside the app. Synced co-watching plays the same video for both people at once, so you are reacting to the same moment at the same second. Synced music does the same for a track or playlist. Prompt games hand you a structured back-and-forth, a question, a would-you-rather, a small challenge, so neither person has to invent the conversation from nothing. Voice and video calls add tone and face, which text strips out. Some apps also fold in an AI facilitator that nudges a stalling exchange along, a different tool but the same aim of keeping two people engaged.

What ties them together is co-presence: you are attending to the same thing at the same time. That is the ingredient that makes them more than a feature list, and it is exactly what the research on shared experience is about.

Why shared activity beats chat: the research

Start with attention. A 2016 study by Wolf, Launay and Dunbar, published in the [British Journal of Psychology](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26256821/), found that simply attending to the same side of a screen as another person raised scores on a social bonding scale, whether or not the two shared a goal. Joint attention alone nudged people toward feeling closer. That is the mechanism a co-watching feature is quietly exploiting: two people locked onto the same moment are, in a small but measurable way, bonding through the act of shared focus.

Then there is intensity. In a well-known 2014 study published in Psychological Science and summarised by [ScienceDaily](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141007103433.htm), Erica Boothby and colleagues had people taste chocolate either at the same time as someone else or while that person did something else. When the experience was shared, the pleasant chocolate was rated more pleasant, and in a follow-up the unpleasant chocolate more unpleasant, even though the two never spoke. Sharing an experience amplified it. Doing something together, not just near each other, makes the thing itself feel more.

Psychologist Garriy Shteynberg pulled the wider pattern together in a 2015 paper in [Perspectives on Psychological Science](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691615589104), cataloguing repeatable effects of shared attention: stronger memory, more intense emotion, greater motivation. Put those together and the case is straightforward. Attention shared with another person is experienced more vividly and remembered better, which is precisely the raw material a new friendship needs and precisely what a plain text thread fails to supply.

Why this matters more for new and online friendships

Early friendship is awkward because two people have no shared history to draw on. Conversation stalls, silences feel loaded, and both sides fall back on the interview script of jobs and hometowns. A shared activity dissolves that. It manufactures the common reference points that established friends already have, and it gives silence somewhere to go, because you are both watching, listening or playing rather than staring at a cursor.

It also builds the kind of memory that carries a relationship forward. The friendships that stick are not made of good messages, they are made of shared moments you can both refer back to. An activity gives you that moment on day one. This is part of why some people describe the best of these apps as a digital third place, a shared space that is neither home nor work, which we explore in [what is a digital third space](https://vairi.app/journal/what-is-a-digital-third-space). And it is why activities help turn an online contact into a real friend rather than a permanent pen pal, a transition we cover in [how to make friends online](https://vairi.app/journal/how-to-make-friends-online).

How different apps handle this

The tools split into two camps. General platforms let friends do activities together but assume you already know who you are meeting. Teleparty, the browser extension formerly called Netflix Party, syncs streaming video so a group can watch the same show in time, with a side chat. Discord gives friends voice channels, screen sharing and a Watch Together mode. Both are excellent at the activity itself, and both leave the finding-a-person part entirely to you. They are places to hang out with people you have, not tools to meet people you do not.

Friendship apps that build activities in are trying to close that gap, putting the meeting and the shared experience in one place. Vairi, the app I work on, is one example: its in-chat activities include synced co-watching of video and film, synced music, prompt games and voice or video calls, with an AI facilitator called Pidge to help move a conversation along. The honest context is that Vairi is small and early, live only in London and New York, so the pool is thinner than a big platform, and the activities are there to warm up a fresh match rather than to entertain an existing friend group. That is a narrower job than Discord does, aimed at a different moment.

The research in one place: joint attention alone raises felt closeness (Wolf, Launay and Dunbar, 2016); sharing an experience amplifies how intense it feels, even in silence (Boothby and colleagues, 2014); and shared attention reliably strengthens memory, emotion and motivation (Shteynberg, 2015). Together they explain why a co-watched film or a synced song builds a bond faster than an equal amount of typed conversation.

Key takeaways

Digital activities are shared, real-time things you do inside a friendship app: synced co-watching, synced music, prompt games, and voice or video calls. What unites them is co-presence, attending to the same thing at the same time, which is where their power comes from.

The psychology is well supported. Joint attention alone raised social bonding in Wolf, Launay and Dunbar''s 2016 study; Boothby''s 2014 work showed shared experience amplifies feeling even without talking; and Shteynberg''s 2015 review catalogued stronger memory, emotion and motivation under shared attention. That is why doing something together beats chatting about yourselves, especially for new or online friendships that have no shared history yet.

General tools like Teleparty and Discord do the activity well but leave finding the person to you; some friendship apps, Vairi among them, build activities in to warm up a new match, with the trade-off of a smaller pool. Either way, the value is the shared moment you can both point back to, which a plain text thread never gives you.